If AR does not respond, maybe they don’t know who you are
“Remarkably hard to get hold of anyone at Oracle and Microsoft analyst relations.” is a tweet that caught our attention. The twit had a link to his firm’s blog, which then led us to the firm’s main website. The firm was unfamiliar to us (for this post it does not matter the name of the firm), but after digging around for a few minutes it did seem like an analyst firm, but one with a very specific focus. However, at first glance the firm’s specialty did not seem relevant to Oracle and Microsoft so that is maybe why AR did not respond. An unknown analyst requesting AR assistance might only get a single quick glance at their website or blog because most AR teams are so busy responding to known analyst requests and preparing for the next proactive outreach that they do not have the time to do the type of digging that we do.
One of SageCircle’s common inquiries is “Have you heard of firm x? They just contacted us and we don’t know who they are. Should we respond?” With many hundreds of analyst firms in the ecosystem it is not surprising that AR is not familiar with every one of them. Of the more than 160 analyst firms represented in the Analyst Twitter Directory, there were quite a few that we had to investigate to determine whether they were truly analyst firms. If we had to investigate and ponder then there is little chance that an overworked AR professional would devote the same resources.
AR gets requests from all sorts of people, especially if they post a generic contact link on the website (e.g. AR@companyname.com or a web form). When we ran corporate AR for a major vendor, we would field requests from reporters, Wall Street analysts, college students, competitive intelligence firms working for competitors, consultants, think tank researchers, other vendors’ […]
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